A light rain falls onto the thatched roof of the communal bamboo hut, and smoke from a dying fire drifts lazily up the walls, wafting over deer antlers, boar jawbones and ceremonial swords that decorate the interior like trophies from a forgotten time.

“Every day I think: Can our language be passed down to the next generation? It is the deepest wish in my heart that it can be,” he says.

Kanakanavu, Sung says, has a lot more going for it than just its intrinsic value. It belongs to the same language family that experts believe spread from Taiwan 4,000 years ago, giving birth to languages spoken today by 400 million people in an arc extending from Easter Island off South America to Madagascar, off Africa.

“Taiwan is where it all starts,” says archeologist Peter Bellwood, who with linguist Robert Blust developed the now widely accepted theory that people from Taiwan leveraged superior navigation skills to spread their Austronesian language far and wide. At least four of Taiwan’s 14 government-recognized Aboriginal languages are still spoken by thousands of people, but a race is on to save the others from extinction.

The youngest good speaker of Kanakanavu, also known as Southern Tsou, is 60, and the next-youngest, 73.

“To survive a language has to be spoken,” Sung said. “And with this one it isn’t happening.”

It’s a story repeated in the remote corners of the earth, as younger generations look to the dominant language for economic survival and advancement, whether it be English or, in Taiwan’s case, Mandarin.

Aborigines account for only 2 percent of the Taiwanese population of 23 million. Many young people are leaving Dakanua, a picturesque village in the south that is home to the Kanakanavu language, to work in the cities.

Sung is clearly revered by Dakanua’s tiny cadre of Kanakanavu speakers, who are happy to spend long hours going over their language with her and a small group of graduate students she brings to the village from National Taiwan University in Taipei.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, they sat outside a well-ordered cluster of whitewashed concrete buildings, painstakingly documenting the proper use of the imperative and the grammatical subtleties of concepts like “it could be that” or “it is possible that.”

In the background the bamboo and palm tree covered contours of Mount Anguana protruded through a moving blanket of fog and mist, and a thin rain fell in the Nanzihsian River (楠梓仙溪) valley below.

Life here is defined by farming, a reverent belief in Christianity — Presbyterian and Roman Catholic missionaries converted almost two-thirds of the Aboriginal population in the 1930s and 1940s — and chronic concern about the harsh elements. Five hundred residents in the nearby Siaolin Village (小林) were buried alive three-and-a-half years ago when torrential rains unleashed by a typhoon sent thousands of tonnes of mud cascading down onto their homes.

Sung started working with Aboriginal languages almost by accident. After returning to Taiwan in 1994 as a newly minted doctor of linguistics from the University of Illinois, her department head at National Taiwan University pushed her into the discipline, insisting that Taiwan’s majority Chinese population had to understand more about its Aboriginal minority.